tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-287408052024-03-13T06:22:15.349-07:00Baltimore InterviewBaltimore Interviewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02907515428932839105noreply@blogger.comBlogger16125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28740805.post-32572886389981593922009-01-29T06:51:00.000-08:002009-01-31T11:31:33.328-08:00Koan for Kini Collins<div align="justify"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SYSDqmr1DfI/AAAAAAAAAIc/4fxZA4hP63I/s1600-h/k1a.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5297503829656669682" style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; width: 215px; height: 296px;" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SYSDqmr1DfI/AAAAAAAAAIc/4fxZA4hP63I/s320/k1a.jpg" border="0" /></a><a href="http://www.1448.org/artists/collins/portfolio/">Kini Collins</a> paints pretty unicorns. They canter over emerald fields, pink manes in the wind, hooves striking silver sparks from the stones.<br /><br />In fact, she doesn’t. But if she did, if they started showing up in her work, she hopes they'd be welcome. "If I see something I'm doing that disturbs me, that I didn't know was in me," Kini says, "I want to keep doing it. If I start painting pink unicorns, I hope I'll continue, even if it grosses me out."<br /><br />Last year, Kini decided she'd spent enough energy trying to promote and sell her work—her paintings and sculpture. She stopped submitting to shows, pulled her work from the galleries that represented her, and quit attempting to make a living from art. Now, she only sells her art directly out of her studio, and she sells it for the aggregate cost of her materials, calculating the total amount it takes to make her work and then dividing that<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SYSWbfqpasI/AAAAAAAAAJk/afiO76dtOr8/s1600-h/k3.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5297524460795554498" style="margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; width: 219px; height: 167px;" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SYSWbfqpasI/AAAAAAAAAJk/afiO76dtOr8/s200/k3.jpg" border="0" /></a> by the number of pieces she has. L<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SYSNPlL1PkI/AAAAAAAAAIk/_o5cdSKgxOo/s1600-h/J+006.jpg"></a>ast time she invited buyers to her studio, she sold her paintings for 35 dollars each.<br /><br />Though she isn't sure this has had an effect on what she paints, she feels the liberation of her decision. "I don't feel like I have to repeat myself to satisfy a gallery or the market. I know that whatever I'm making, I'm being true to myself."<br /><br />The challenge for any artist is to keep on compass, to find the still point of their creative life and make sure that, among the business of art, the art stays central. For Kini, this challenge is paramount, and one she keeps mindful at all times. The moral content of her work is, as she says, as important as the aesthetic. In fact, they're much the same thing.<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SYSQ7m3TgOI/AAAAAAAAAIs/HiaUrjYtDJI/s1600-h/bird.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5297518415413739746" style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; width: 174px; height: 169px;" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SYSQ7m3TgOI/AAAAAAAAAIs/HiaUrjYtDJI/s200/bird.jpg" border="0" /></a>Kini's paintings are spare, economical. The colors tend to be muted and the forms simplified. There is a solitude about them and a strong contemplative bent. She's fond of birds, pigeons and sparrows and the red knot, which gathers each spring on a beach in <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">Delaware</st1:place></st1:state>. It's interesting that these birds—usually considered such social animals—are often alone, a single pigeon against planes of thickly applied color or the hazy form of a red knot in flight. The last is particularly striking, given that the red knot is known for its crowded seaside arrival.<br /><br />Also interesting is the stillness that envelops the birds. Kini sculpts pigeons and sparrows out of wire mesh and plaster, perching them on rough blocks of wood. The nervous energy usually associated with birds is quieted, and there is a turned-inward quality, the wings and eyes calm and restful.<br /><br />"What I like to do," Kini says, "is find the essence of something and see if it fits inside my <a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SYSRXt8oncI/AAAAAAAAAI0/8AKQSjX5UuQ/s1600-h/spine1.jpg"></a>integrity sphere, whether it resonates with me emotionally, morally, and physically." This search<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SYSRlaYD_mI/AAAAAAAAAI8/HkItXTgIGLU/s1600-h/spine1.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5297519133615980130" style="margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; width: 206px; height: 233px;" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SYSRlaYD_mI/AAAAAAAAAI8/HkItXTgIGLU/s320/spine1.jpg" border="0" /></a> for the essence of things takes Kini within herself, to look for the center spot, the quintessence of a bird or a patch of weeds, and contemplate its stillness whatever movement it may typically show on the outside. The result is a kind of tension between the physicality of the subject and the meditative essence she looks for.<br /><br />For many years, Kini practiced martial arts, moving for a time to <st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on">Japan</st1:country-region></st1:place> to immerse herself in that discipline. It's no great leap to see how the essence-seeking of her visual art stems from a similar impulse in the martial arts, with their emphasis on meditation and simplicity of form. But perhaps this is also the source of that tension mentioned above, between physicality and spirit, movement and contemplation.<br /><br />The materials Kini uses in her art—thick applications of paint, wax, sand, plaster, charcoal—and her love of laboring <a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SYSSVnONB1I/AAAAAAAAAJE/ulyso80rnGo/s1600-h/k4.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5297519961698010962" style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; width: 239px; height: 170px;" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SYSSVnONB1I/AAAAAAAAAJE/ulyso80rnGo/s200/k4.jpg" border="0" /></a>over those materials give a strong corporality to the work. As she says, "There's always a lot more in my painting than ends up there. I put a whole bunch of stuff down and then subtract from it." The physical act of painting is thus as important to her as the final product. Interesting then that this art of subtraction, physical as it is, results in a paradoxic stillness too, a hard-won mindfulness that is very much of the mind.<br /><br />Far from troubling her though, Kini enjoys these kinds of paradoxes and seeks them out. On the one hand, she speaks of the inward quality of her art, how her birds and cityscapes are always some reflection of her thoughts. Later, she tells me that her spine series, elongated depictions of backbones in paint and wax, are the only truly personal work she has done, reflecting her struggles with disc degeneration. The apparent contradictions here do not seem to bother her, probably because both are true in their own context. For Kini, the tension betw<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SYSUkrGx7qI/AAAAAAAAAJc/nfzQunGFkrE/s1600-h/bird3.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5297522419461910178" style="margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; width: 180px; height: 200px;" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SYSUkrGx7qI/AAAAAAAAAJc/nfzQunGFkrE/s200/bird3.jpg" border="0" /></a>een two seemingly opposing ideas makes for a greater truth, one more complex and hard won. "The next incarnation of humans," she says, "if there is to be one, will live comfortably with paradox."<br /><br />That attraction to the hard won, the struggled for, is the same attraction she has to her subjects.<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SYSS7jT3XAI/AAAAAAAAAJM/rtP-1ZFwiyc/s1600-h/Love.jpg"></a> Kini likes pigeons, sparrows, because they are the underdogs of the bird world, the neglected and sometimes despised, who nevertheless scratch out a good living among the streets and dirty buildings of the city. "These are working-class birds!" she says, pleased with the idea. They fit within the sphere of her integrity, the still point of her contemplation, as well as the scrappy physicality of work and the urban landscape. No pink unicorns, these city birds, though maybe one day they'll join them on verdant pastures. </div>Baltimore Interviewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02907515428932839105noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28740805.post-75006570085034866242008-11-14T10:02:00.000-08:002008-11-19T08:27:54.205-08:00Gloria Garrett: Makeup, Make Art<div align="justify"><div><div><div><div><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SSMNu4tEhYI/AAAAAAAAAHg/PZ8inOOUkAk/s1600-h/g1.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5270071088100181378" style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; width: 138px; height: 200px;" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SSMNu4tEhYI/AAAAAAAAAHg/PZ8inOOUkAk/s200/g1.jpg" border="0" /></a>In art, we favor detachment, distance. An artist should be aware of the irony of her art, even when the art is not meant to be ironic. In fact, the more earnest the art, the more irony in the artist we expect. <i>Oh</i>, we like her to say, <i>I'm only trying. Shouting out from the wilderness. Likely my art will never matter.<br /></i><br />Art for <a href="http://www.gloriasart.com">Gloria Garrett</a> matters. It has force. It changed her life and it can change others'. Three years ago, after a personal tragedy, she asked, "Lord, give me something to bring the beauty back!" She was given art.<br /><br />Gloria calls herself the Mother of Makeup Art. She paints with makeup, <a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SSMQG8W9pTI/AAAAAAAAAHo/axXqEe5eSeQ/s1600-h/RabbitStoryOrg.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5270073700421313842" style="margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; width: 155px; height: 200px;" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SSMQG8W9pTI/AAAAAAAAAHo/axXqEe5eSeQ/s200/RabbitStoryOrg.jpg" border="0" /></a>although that word might not be the best to describe what she does. She uses the brush that comes with the eyeliner—smearing, stabbing, finessing—she draws with five shades of lipstick as if they were pastels, she selects the right shades of eyebrow pencil, and then, when she really gets going, in come the fingers and fingernails, the heels of her hands. Fifteen minutes later and she is as brightly painted as her subject, layers of color across the paper and over her hands.<br /><br />"I want to paint happy!" says Gloria. "A woman told my husband that by looking at my art, she can tell I'm a happy person." There's a child-like intensity to Gloria, her laughter and exclamations, and to her work. First <a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SSMQYsjhMRI/AAAAAAAAAHw/uVssQcVx0ms/s1600-h/g3.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5270074005416653074" style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; width: 200px; height: 137px;" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SSMQYsjhMRI/AAAAAAAAAHw/uVssQcVx0ms/s200/g3.jpg" border="0" /></a>glance you see a funny picture of a bunny, sitting on a rock, surrounded by flowers. It has bunny ears and bunny whiskers and a bandana tied around its neck. It's a kid's drawing, you think, cute and vibrant, a precocious child. But there's a process too, a series of subtle decisions. You look again and see the working of color, the blending, the movement of paint. Pigment has been layered in to produce translucency and depth, each flower is given attention, some move with light, some dissolve into ground.<br /><br />Gloria talks a lot about movement in her work. She uses Wite-Out to give an energy to her subjects, accenting the borders of her forms to impart vigor. "It lightens things up," she says, "puts the feeling and the movement in."<br /><br />She's also sure of the goal of her art: to move the people who see it. Gloria is a folk artist, paints <a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SSMQ_nDQ1rI/AAAAAAAAAH4/lOP-FoN423g/s1600-h/g2.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5270074673954084530" style="margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; width: 242px; height: 159px;" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SSMQ_nDQ1rI/AAAAAAAAAH4/lOP-FoN423g/s200/g2.jpg" border="0" /></a>everyday subjects, scenes that help people see the joy in life. She works with the elderly and is happy to take requests for the topics of her paintings, scenes of blackboards and children for a woman who was a school teacher in her younger years. Gloria then gives much of her art away, the originals or the print photographs taken by her husband. In return, she lobbies for donations—extra canvases, a sheaf of paper, unwanted tubes of lipstick. "I'll use anything," she says. "Whatever people give me. Give me something and I'll find a way to use it!"<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SSMRVyQ63lI/AAAAAAAAAIA/_bYNBmbxCNo/s1600-h/Obama.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5270075054921277010" style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; width: 200px; height: 131px;" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SSMRVyQ63lI/AAAAAAAAAIA/_bYNBmbxCNo/s200/Obama.jpg" border="0" /></a>Gloria is what she does. That she has been painting three short years, that she wasn't trained in the university, does not stop her from identifying herself as an artist. And her confidence is meant as an invitation to others. "My grandchildren say, 'Grandma, if <i>you</i> can do it, <i>we</i> can do it.' And I say, 'Go ahead!'"<br /><br />As I watch Gloria paint "A Rabbit Story," she works intently, fast, nearly furiously. She <a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SSMRdf4QRBI/AAAAAAAAAII/yaRNyX_nzbc/s1600-h/JY2.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5270075187424936978" style="margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; width: 200px; height: 160px;" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SSMRdf4QRBI/AAAAAAAAAII/yaRNyX_nzbc/s200/JY2.jpg" border="0" /></a>rummages through her box of makeup to find the proper colors to suit her mood. She wants to get the picture down, put the feelings in her head to paper. She lets me know, though, that she'll come back, later, spend whatever time is needed to get things right. "Patience," she says. "Three years ago, I got some patience. And patience brings you peace." Three years ago, Gloria realized there was work to do, art to be made. And she was sure of it, she made the decision: <i>Yes, it matters.</i></div></div></div></div></div>Baltimore Interviewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02907515428932839105noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28740805.post-7585259499926580122008-10-03T08:23:00.000-07:002008-10-11T12:00:51.810-07:00High Art/Low Art: R.L. Tillman<div align="justify"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SPDkE0qIewI/AAAAAAAAAGg/9UfbLAuM-SQ/s1600-h/rt.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5255951536647338754" style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left;" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SPDkE0qIewI/AAAAAAAAAGg/9UfbLAuM-SQ/s320/rt.jpg" border="0" /></a><a href="http://rltillman.com/">R.L. Tillman</a> is going to give you a wooden nickel. Really. He's made up a bunch of wood coins, each with a cartoony likeness of himself, one side declaring, "In Fraud We Trust," the other giving his website address. The nickel, which he hands out for self-promotion like a business card, is so much like the body of his work as to be emblematic. It's a funny idea, a bit silly, certainly stagey, it incorporates <i>bad design</i>—a label R.L. himself applies to his work—and plays a kind of off-hand pop-culture riff, all the while carrying a vaguely serious, vaguely political or critical, undertone. The coin is also handily metaphoric for an artist who likes to talk on two sides of the artistic conversation, populist and glitzy in much of his own work, subtle and sober in the art he curates.<br /><br /></div><div align="justify"><p class="MsoNormal">In 2007, R.L. was asked to design a <i>Radical Shack</i> for Artscape, a booth that would stand in the food court as a kind of antithesis or antidote to the $5 lemonades and ubiquitous gyro <a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SPDnXifpjBI/AAAAAAAAAGo/K98hFdmgIF4/s1600-h/salty.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5255955156723928082" style="margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right;" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SPDnXifpjBI/AAAAAAAAAGo/K98hFdmgIF4/s320/salty.jpg" width="198" border="0" height="181" /></a>sandwiches. R.L. came up with Cotton Salty, a booth that made cotton candy in Garlic, <st1:place st="on"><st1:placename st="on">Old</st1:placename> <st1:placetype st="on">Bay</st1:placetype></st1:place>, and Original Salty flavors. "Humor's an element in most of what I do," R.L. says. "People respond to humor, even people who might not otherwise be receptive to an art experience." For Cotton Salty, he designed a whole range of humorous paraphernalia, banners, logos, buttons, hats, and t-shirts, all of which featured Cotton Salty himself, an eye-patched and mustachioed cotton candy head on a stick. The whole thing was done in bright pink and black; at times, R.L. resorted to carny-type banter to attract his customers. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">R.L. insists that much of his art is <i>bad design</i>—clumsy and lacking in proportion. When I point out that he has developed a strong and vis<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SPDo37SiZZI/AAAAAAAAAGw/OdbhEdcph8s/s1600-h/rt4.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5255956812647261586" style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left;" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SPDo37SiZZI/AAAAAAAAAGw/OdbhEdcph8s/s320/rt4.jpg" width="289" border="0" height="206" /></a>ually arresting signature style, and ask if that isn't the hallmark of <i>good</i> design, he shakes his head. "Talk to any real, professional designer about what I do and he or she will tell you what's up." Of course, there's pride in this self-denial. He keeps in his studio examples of bad design that inspire him, roughly drawn comics from the 40s and 50s, a beer can featuring, inexplicably, a cartoon goat bounding over a cutesy, flowery meadow. </p><p class="MsoNormal">This love of poor design is part of R.L.'s populist bent. "I want to reach past the people who go to galleries or otherwise actively seek out art experiences," he says, "to those who might just be walking around and could be surprised to encounter art." His idea to develop a whole line of promotional materials for a fictional hamburger stand, The Skull, and install it in the student union at <st1:place st="on"><st1:placetype st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename st="on">Maryland</st1:placename></st1:place>, fits right in. R.L. wants to catch people off guard, charm them, make them laugh or scratch their heads, in the hope that they'll think a little more about their environment, more closely notice their habitual landscape.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">What's interesting about this is that it's such a high-art concept, but it's packaged in such a pop-art wrapper. R.L. uses cartoons and fast food, bad design, over the top and show-offy installations in the hope to startle people into deeper thinking, whether about politics, social <a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SPDpQcq-DcI/AAAAAAAAAG4/MRlR8YaK0-I/s1600-h/front_nickels.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5255957233924967874" style="margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; width: 220px; height: 249px;" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SPDpQcq-DcI/AAAAAAAAAG4/MRlR8YaK0-I/s320/front_nickels.jpg" width="253" border="0" height="284" /></a>ideas, or even questions about art. "Sure," he says, "aesthetics are actually really important in my work. I have a pretty strong formal training, so I care a lot about how the work looks." </p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Which brings us to the other side of the R.L. coin, his work as a curator, and specifically his <a href="http://minstallation.blogspot.com">Minstallation Gallery</a>, a box of 225 square inches situated under the steps at the Creative Alliance. Since February of 2008, R.L. has invited five artists or groups of artists to install themselves in the tiny space, including art by Eric Dyer, James Reeder, Post Typography, Laura Amussen, and most recently, 2008 Sondheim Prize winner Geoff Grace. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">As R.L. says, he's careful about whom he invites to show at the Minstallation. "I want people who will do well with the limitations of the tiny space, but I want to ask artists for whom the limitations will be a challenge. Someone who already works in miniatures, say, might not be a good choice—it could be too easy." As such, he's asked Amussen, a sculptor who often works on a large scale, and Grace, whose installation at the BMA this summer took up two walls. What's more, the work the artists contribute is typically quite delicate, subtle, with a high degree of "concept" behind it. Amussen, whose installation <i>Lady Chapel</i> featured tiny gothic windows through which fragments of old paintings of women were seen, sought, as she says, to "[displace] these women, literally cutting them from their roles as mothers, lovers, friends, and wives. Now their gazes and bodies are redirected towards one another in a semi-erotic fashion."</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Clearly, this curatorship is the other side of the nickel for R.L., seemingly miles from Cotton Salty or his new venture, the <a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SPDplztQHkI/AAAAAAAAAHA/Lq5Ahz0QVxw/s1600-h/rt2.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5255957600885808706" style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; width: 226px; height: 171px;" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SPDplztQHkI/AAAAAAAAAHA/Lq5Ahz0QVxw/s320/rt2.jpg" width="275" border="0" height="202" /></a>superheroes Captain <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">Maryland</st1:place></st1:state> and Boy Baltimore. And yet, one has to wonder at the origins for such an idea, this tiny art space. Is there not some showmanship, pop-art flashiness, hidden beneath its subtlety, the desire to create <i>The World's Smallest Gallery</i>? Certainly the art and thought going into it is serious—it's high art—but this is not curating in the usual sense, a white-walled gallery in which the curator remains mostly behind the scenes. The Minstallation—as excellently executed as it is—draws attention to its creator. It's plainly an R.L. Tillman production: quirky, surprising, "gimmicky" in the best sense. </p><p class="MsoNormal">What's also surprising is this: "What I really enjoy," says R.L., "is thinking about people seeing twhen I'm not there. Imagining someone’s reaction to this thing they stumble on. I don’t have to see that reaction, or <a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SPDqs6LNv7I/AAAAAAAAAHQ/S1jUDrRTVQI/s1600-h/rt3a.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5255958822392807346" style="margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right; width: 250px; height: 177px;" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SPDqs6LNv7I/AAAAAAAAAHQ/S1jUDrRTVQI/s320/rt3a.jpg" width="281" border="0" height="201" /></a>get credit for it, to derive a sense of personal satisfaction from my work." Art for R.L., as playful, funny, and interactive as it is, is most enjoyed in his imagination, in the incubator of ideas. Or maybe it's not surprising at all, not for an artist always onto something new, the stacks of notebooks in his studio overflowing with ideas. High or low, the artist is in his art.</p></div>Baltimore Interviewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02907515428932839105noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28740805.post-7583162517706931662008-05-18T16:40:00.000-07:002008-12-13T04:35:21.642-08:00I Dwell, You Dwell: Megan Lavelle, Magnolia Laurie<div><div><div><div><div align="justify"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SDDDihsvyAI/AAAAAAAAADk/II-aaKh5oYs/s1600-h/9a.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5201872567541942274" style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; width: 392px; height: 294px;" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SDDDihsvyAI/AAAAAAAAADk/II-aaKh5oYs/s400/9a.jpg" border="0" /></a><a href="http://howwedwell.wordpress.com/">Megan Lavelle</a> is asking friends, acquaintances, near strangers to live in her home. She isn't asking them as guests—these painters, sculptors, thinkers—but as residents, people who will live in her <st1:place st="on"><st1:placename st="on">Charles</st1:placename> <st1:placename st="on">Village</st1:placename></st1:place> studio for the weekend while she's away at her mother's. These residents will sleep in her bed, handle her most personal objects, rearrange the furniture, and, through art and contemplation, transform her apartment into something new, and possibly strange. At the heart of the matter, Megan wants to know, How do we live, how do we dwell? How do you? How does she?<br /></div><br /><div align="justify">We live our lives in patterns, arranging them amidst the objects and movements we make in our houses. "I was thinking about how my life compares with my mother's," Megan says, "How completely opposite we are. She's so neat, the kind to vacuum right out the door. And I was wondering, how do we develop these habits, where do they come from?" </div><br /><div align="justify">At the center of <i>How We Dwell</i>, the name of Megan's 3-month-long project, is conversation, the inward conversation Megan has with her mother, about their different lives, and the conversations the artists who take up occupancy in her studio<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SDDD6RsvyBI/AAAAAAAAADs/DyefJA01qMo/s1600-h/shrine.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5201872975563835410" style="margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right;" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SDDD6RsvyBI/AAAAAAAAADs/DyefJA01qMo/s320/shrine.jpg" border="0" /></a> have with her. The first of these artists, painter and sculptor <a href="http://www.magnolialaurie.com">Magnolia Laurie</a>, spent a weekend at Megan's, reading the philosopher Heidegger, writing on an old portable typewriter, handling Megan's things, and building sculptures from colored drinking straws. "What is the creative process of living alone?" Magnolia wants to know. "That mindless sort of action, I thought it would be interesting to observe." In her attempt to make those actions explicit, Magnolia began rearranging the collections of things Megan has put together over the years, creating an object "shrine" of sorts—photographs, knickknacks, mementos. Megan's life, as mapped by these things, was reordered, enhanced, through the screen of Magnolia's perceptions. </div><div align="justify"></div><br /><div align="justify">How do you make a life? Magnolia wonders, and through her objects, her home, Megan responds. One wonders though, in such an intimate setting, such a close dialogue as was had between the two artists, what is the nature of this conversation? What are its dynamics, its questions of power and exchange? </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SDDEWBsvyCI/AAAAAAAAAD0/sgxsoVSVtFM/s1600-h/chair.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5201873452305205282" style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left;" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SDDEWBsvyCI/AAAAAAAAAD0/sgxsoVSVtFM/s320/chair.jpg" border="0" /></a>As part of her residency, Magnolia also sculpted. Her arrangements of drinking straws linked end to end formed webs in the corners of Megan's apartment, connected walls and ceilings in airy spans, grew up and around the computer table, through the tangles of electrical cords, like growing ivy. "The straws," says Magnolia, "were a physical representation of the process of my thinking about being in Megan's space that, unlike my rearrangements of her personal objects, which only she would probably notice, would be visible to others." </div><p class="MsoNormal" align="justify">Building the straw sculptures became, for Magnolia, a track of her ideas, an asking of the questions, how do we build a life, how does my life and Megan's connect? In most of these arrangements we see a clear give and take, the sculptural vines meshed harmoniously with the other woman's living space, complementing and magnifying it. In some though, and one in particular—a net of straws spreading out over a chair, making it unusable—we might wonder not so much how do their lives interact, but how has Magnolia's presence changed Megan's life? How has it made it over?</p><p class="MsoNormal" align="justify">As Megan writes in the <i>How We Dwell</i> blog, "Magnolia builds a fiasco – a constructed fiasco – with Heidegger and 225 flexible straws. From the moment of entry she has sorted through my chaotic order with grace. Small, quiet, beautiful arrangements have been collected in <a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SDDE0RsvyEI/AAAAAAAAAEE/n2e0SXk1zeY/s1600-h/3a.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5201873971996248130" style="margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right;" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SDDE0RsvyEI/AAAAAAAAAEE/n2e0SXk1zeY/s200/3a.jpg" border="0" /></a>place of clutter." Megan has accepted Magnolia's changes with magnanimity and poise. And Magnolia, for her part, was, as she says, "a polite presence," her goal not to impede Megan's life but to observe and move with it. We can wonder though, whether over the next 3 months the experiences Megan will have with her other residents will be so harmonious. </p><p class="MsoNormal" align="justify">"It'll be interesting to see how these other people, some who I don't know that well, will interpret my life," Megan says. "In the time off between installations, I wonder how my habits will reassert themselves?" It's a tall order to ask oneself these questions over and again, putting yourself to the microscope of other people's investigations, giving your home over to the habits of others. In the end though, we might recognize that even the most solitary of people dwell in the homes of all of us strangers.</p></div></div></div></div>Baltimore Interviewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02907515428932839105noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28740805.post-73157418074856729552007-05-19T08:19:00.000-07:002008-12-13T04:35:22.642-08:00Roses of Different Names: The Work of Erin Cluley<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SDGJ1xsvyFI/AAAAAAAAAEM/BMpctWFj3-M/s1600-h/e1.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5202090601556723794" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SDGJ1xsvyFI/AAAAAAAAAEM/BMpctWFj3-M/s320/e1.jpg" border="0" /></a>The roses in <a href="http://www.erincluley.com/">Erin Cluley</a>'s newest work are in for a fight. In <i>Veiled Devotion 1</i>, the five roses in this small painting stand behind a screen of repeated shapes Erin says are derived from Catholic imagery and allude to her upbringing in that religion. "The image is an adaptation of the floor plan of St. Peter's Basilica," she says, "and references things like confessional screens in the church." The flowers in this painting are effectively fenced off by the screen, held back from entering the foreground, partitioned from the viewer. The other three paintings in the series show the roses in similar states, seemingly struggling for their definition against the screen in number 2 and barely visible at all amidst the patterning in the third. The roses are strong and central images, that in number 4 even making its way to the foreground, but the resistance they face in each work is palpable.<br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/Rk8i80oOFvI/AAAAAAAAACE/LOAlUkDz1sE/s1600-h/rose.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5066306534129932018" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px" height="207" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/Rk8i80oOFvI/AAAAAAAAACE/LOAlUkDz1sE/s320/rose.jpg" width="288" border="0" /></a><br />"The roses are symbols of female sexuality," <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 /><st1:place st="on">Erin</st1:place> says,<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/Rk8iqEoOFuI/AAAAAAAAAB8/PzJ0Sx9j2U4/s1600-h/rose.jpg"></a> "both a reference to female anatomy and to women's sexual lives in general." Recognizing the validity of this in <st1:place st="on">Erin</st1:place>'s work takes no great intellectual leap, considering the long history of artistic association between flowers and women's sexuality, not to mention their purely visual suggestiveness. From there, it is also no great leap to recognize that the force the flowers struggle against in the <i>Veiled Devotion</i> series is the oppression of religious institution, a theme that, as we'll see, runs strongly through <st1:place st="on">Erin</st1:place>'s work. What is maybe less obvious at first glance, though, is that, strangely enough, the shape that makes up the individual elements of the screen patterns is itself rose-like, the kind of rosette so commonly found in the art and architecture of the Catholic church.<br /><br /><st1:place st="on"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/Rk8g3koOFtI/AAAAAAAAAB0/517EacxNiMg/s1600-h/e3.jpg"></a><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/Rk8jQkoOFwI/AAAAAAAAACM/rImn9-iBMcc/s1600-h/girl.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5066306873432348418" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/Rk8jQkoOFwI/AAAAAAAAACM/rImn9-iBMcc/s320/girl.jpg" border="0" /></a>Erin</st1:place>'s piece, <i>Veiled Confessions</i>, makes explicit the sexual themes of her work. The central element in the piece is a figure, painted in white on a sheet of mylar drafting film, of a nude woman, her head thrown back, seemingly in some sort of ecstasy, and her knees open wide. Again, the screen pattern makes its way into the work, this time as a series of rosettes cut through the mylar, behind which are three small, metallic paintings. "The guilt in the Catholic faith is so strong" <st1:place st="on">Erin</st1:place> says. "Masturbation, sex as a mortal sin. A lot of what I've been talking about in my work is the deprivation of my sexuality as a woman." Again, then, we see the rigid religious patterning juxtaposed with the sexual, the guilt and repression of the one against the open and unabashed freedom of the other.<br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/Rk8jd0oOFxI/AAAAAAAAACU/Dlo9yjYkfc4/s1600-h/e3.jpg"></a><br />What is interesting though is how this pairing is treated in her work, how other <a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/Rk8j-koOFzI/AAAAAAAAACk/T1ObiA1J8Fs/s1600-h/e3.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5066307663706330930" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/Rk8j-koOFzI/AAAAAAAAACk/T1ObiA1J8Fs/s200/e3.jpg" border="0" /></a>types of pairings work as well. <st1:place st="on">Erin</st1:place>'s grandmother was Lebanese-American, and this Arabic lineage was central to many of her early works, especially her <i>Heritage</i> series of paintings. Later, after a trip to southern <st1:country-region st="on">Spain</st1:country-region> where she visited the Moorish palaces and mosques, <st1:place st="on">Erin</st1:place> began incorporating Muslim-related imagery into her work, often right beside the Catholic. Her painting, <i>Ten Lovely Prayers</i>, combines a floral pattern at one side of the painting and a series of nails at the other, all over a cloudy, mediative wash of color. "When I was in <st1:country-region st="on">Spain</st1:country-region>," says <st1:place st="on">Erin</st1:place>, "I was taken by how they used pattern and repetition on the walls that gave this quiet, meditative feel. And I realized that they used the same [rosette] pattern I was using in my earlier paintings in reference to Catholicism."<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/Rk8oCkoOF1I/AAAAAAAAAC0/8IzlV_2tFVE/s1600-h/e2.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5066312130472318802" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px" height="223" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/Rk8oCkoOF1I/AAAAAAAAAC0/8IzlV_2tFVE/s320/e2.jpg" width="290" border="0" /></a>The nails, then, with their Christ-like connotations, their nod towards penance and punishment, their undertones of sexual penetration, are balanced against the quiet, mosque-like atmosphere of the painting, the echo of Muslim devotion and prayer in the floral designs. As Erin says, "Something came together for me when I visited <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Spain</st1:place></st1:country-region>. I found a way to bring a light into the work I was doing, dispel some of the anger I had against my Catholic upbringing." <st1:place st="on">Erin</st1:place> had found a bridge between Catholicism, its rules and punishment-reward dynamic, and the spirituality she felt among the Moorish architecture, a bridge made up, appropriately for an artist, of images.<br /><br /><div align="justify"></div><br /><div align="justify">Even in her latest work, those small paintings of roses, works that apparently pit religion against freedom, we see a similar balancing, a careful weighing of elements that points almost to a need for reconciliation. We see this in the compositional harmony of the work, a structural equilibrium between those rigid patterns and the organic shapes of the flowers. As <st1:place st="on">Erin</st1:place> says, "I know my work is heading in the right direction when I find a sense of composition, the harder elements working alongside the softer ones. I absolutely need that," she adds. What's more, the opposing kinds of imagery, veils and flowers, the meditative and the rule-bound, are dependent upon each other in the work for their potency, the ecstasy of the figure in white requiring the boundaries of religion to emphasize and define itself.<br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/Rk8oa0oOF2I/AAAAAAAAAC8/WMAjGiFm6xo/s1600-h/e5.jpg"></a><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/Rk8p6koOF4I/AAAAAAAAADM/ZFsvz4GJ7tc/s1600-h/e5.jpg"></a><br />Seen in this context, <st1:place st="on">Erin</st1:place>'s work may be less about struggle, hard versus soft, <a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/Rk8qRkoOF5I/AAAAAAAAADU/OVN7pjKDkYc/s1600-h/e5.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5066314587193612178" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 164px; HEIGHT: 242px" height="285" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/Rk8qRkoOF5I/AAAAAAAAADU/OVN7pjKDkYc/s320/e5.jpg" width="186" border="0" /></a><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/Rk8pIEoOF3I/AAAAAAAAADE/U1PpbGniM8E/s1600-h/e5.jpg"></a>rule versus freedom, than it is about integration. There is almost a theological outlook to her work in its need for balance in opposition. The roses that in her paintings have come to represent her striving toward sexual and intellectual expression are balanced against the patterned roses of the church, finding echo and resonance, compositional unity, only when arranged together on the same canvas. Certainly this does not downplay the importance of that struggle, overcoming the should-nots of personal and cultural history, but <st1:place st="on">Erin</st1:place>'s work reminds us of the essential duality of our religious, and Western, thinking and of finding our way to some reconciliation of light and dark, freedom and constraint, action and meditation. </div>Baltimore Interviewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02907515428932839105noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28740805.post-66241640458426869252007-04-18T07:56:00.000-07:002008-12-13T04:35:23.689-08:00The Violent Collage: Work of Ramsay Antonio-Barnes<div align="justify"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/RiZfobI8rqI/AAAAAAAAAAU/xkfLO09h9eE/s1600-h/j2.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5054832779854655138" style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left;" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/RiZfobI8rqI/AAAAAAAAAAU/xkfLO09h9eE/s320/j2.jpg" border="0" /></a><a href="http://www.ramsaybarnes.com/">Ramsay Antonio-Barnes</a> is throwing knives at you. His large wall collage, <i>Tool</i>, is a spray of knives, a jet of blades erupting from a central core, menacing the room. The work is personal, reflecting Ramsay's boyhood fascination with knives, his long-time membership in the Boy and Eagle Scouts, but there's a stark objectivity to it as well, an almost ritualized show of violence, and fear, directed at, and implicating, the audience. "What is our capability for violence?" Ramsay asks. "Do knives kill people or do we kill people? How much do we fear that capability?"<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">** </div></div><div align="justify"><br />Several years ago, Ramsay began appropriating images from camping and Eagle Scout manuals to use in his painting. He used these images of Scouts and Scout leaders to look at adolescence, its fears and hopes, its burgeoning sexuality, and to explore how in contemporary culture we make the transitions to adulthood. "The work deals with the kind of sexual ambiguity of the time,"<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/RiZnsbI8rtI/AAAAAAAAAAs/hEic0ziN71c/s1600-h/tool.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5054841644667154130" style="margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right;" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/RiZnsbI8rtI/AAAAAAAAAAs/hEic0ziN71c/s320/tool.jpg" border="0" /></a> Ramsay says, "that awkward coming of age and realization of sexual identity." His painting, <i>Infolding,</i> shows boys in various poses, squatting before a race or wrestling together on the ground. The depictions might seem straightforward enough except for the bloody-colored smear wiped across a boy's face or the sexual tension Ramsey imparts to the piece through the boys' exuberant physicality and evocative poses.<br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Again, there is the obvious personal aspect of these paintings, Ramsay reflecting on his childhood, his coming to terms as a bisexual male. And yet the illustrative quality of the images, borrowing as they are from manuals, allows a certain remove from the work, an emotional distance through the generalized quality of the drawings. Through the paintings we're invited to look at the ritual of childhood and sex, its violence and fear and excitement, stand back and observe how we, and we all, cross that threshold from children to adults.<br /></div><p align="justify">For Ramsay, the knife image is a perfect distillation of this subjective/objective interplay. "The knife," he says, "has become almost an icon for me because it's <a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/RiZoe7I8ruI/AAAAAAAAAA0/AkppiPtbwpI/s1600-h/dripping.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5054842512250547938" style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left;" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/RiZoe7I8ruI/AAAAAAAAAA0/AkppiPtbwpI/s320/dripping.jpg" border="0" /></a>both something personal, but it's also a compact symbol for bigger ideas of violence or control." In his pocket-knife collages, Ramsay has photographed his Eagle Scout knife and then Photoshopped in images of Edwardian era <st1:place st="on">Coney Island</st1:place> divers, mustached and dressed in full-body bathing suits. These divers, which Ramsay describes as feminized males with their pointed feet and graceful diving poses, are balanced against or in opposition to the knife handle or blades. Looking at these collages, we can wonder, are the divers using the knives as gymnastic props or are they doing their best to avoid the sharp edges of the blades? "Who is in control?" Ramsay asks.<br /><br />In a similar vein, Ramsay has been looking at images of bullfighters, stylized and androgynous, and incorporating them into mixed media works of cut paper and sequins. "In bullfights, you have this very ornate man," he says, "and this display of ritualized murder, but there is also a strong element of danger,<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/RiZsCrI8ryI/AAAAAAAAABU/mPxPdhqmiC8/s1600-h/r4.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5054846424965754658" style="margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right;" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/RiZsCrI8ryI/AAAAAAAAABU/mPxPdhqmiC8/s320/r4.jpg" border="0" height="282" width="189" /></a> things that can be controlled and things that can't." Ramsay has an interest in going to watch the bullfights, just as he attended a night of boxing matches not too long ago, out of a desire for personal involvement: "I wanted to go to the boxing matches to pay, to promote this thing, to be as much a part of it as I could while still being a spectator." Still, again, there is the tension in this work between a sense of individual experience and a stylized remove. His <i>drunk love</i> sculpture, a recreation of his personal punching bag screen printed and hand stamped with the images of men in a boxing ring, has obvious autobiographical elements but something in its size and weightiness is also distant and objective, clearly a constructed <i>object</i> of art. </p><div align="center">**<br /></div><div align="justify">"The knife is a perfect open/closed, on/off form," Ramsay says. "When open, the knife has a whole different meaning, whole different connotation, than when it's closed. What happens when you open it?" For Ramsay, the appropriation of this image, like the images of bullfighters or Eagle Scouts, generates a powerful crux<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/RiZmqrI8rrI/AAAAAAAAAAc/6TR5p56TDgA/s1600-h/j1.jpg"></a> between opposing forces, ritual versus <a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/RiZp6bI8rxI/AAAAAAAAABM/NUeo2ak4pdg/s1600-h/j1.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5054844084208578322" style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left;" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/RiZp6bI8rxI/AAAAAAAAABM/NUeo2ak4pdg/s320/j1.jpg" border="0" /></a>action, male versus female, personal versus universal, subjective versus objective. His work, constantly collaging itself, borrowing from his life and others', from camping manuals and diving illustration, grapples with our shifting sense of identity, who we are and how much we, and how much the world, are in charge of where we are going. </div>Baltimore Interviewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02907515428932839105noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28740805.post-1173971147494630262007-03-15T09:00:00.000-07:002008-12-13T04:35:24.470-08:00Laura Shults and the Sculpted Sky<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SDH4_BsvyGI/AAAAAAAAAEU/-pYr83o6Bvw/s1600-h/ls1a.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5202212806261196898" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iIKL9eLuFTM/SDH4_BsvyGI/AAAAAAAAAEU/-pYr83o6Bvw/s320/ls1a.jpg" border="0" /></a><a href="http://www.montgomerycollege.edu/schoolofartanddesign/documents/LauraPage.pdf">Laura Shults</a> dislikes being asked why, why she builds airplanes, out of wood and plastic and lead, why she is fascinated with clouds, sculpted from foam and paper, why she is so taken with flight and air and sky. She dislikes the question because it's hard to answer, she dislikes it because she's not sure she knows, she dislikes it because she's not sure she, or we, need to know. "Why do artists do anything?" she asks, her smile challenging but friendly.<br /><br />For Laura, art is process. In her Area 405 studio on <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 /><st1:street st="on"><st1:address st="on">Oliver Street</st1:address></st1:street>, she is at work sculpting a new airplane. The building was a curtain and blind factory and when the company moved out, it left behind rolls of fabric and plastic—green vinyl and red checks. After Laura has designed the skeleton of her airplane, drawing out the plans on broad sheets of brown paper, and then has fashioned it together, she will cover the craft in a gold polyvinyl found in a room upstairs, padding and shaping out <a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_BASFkhHVQLo/Rfrw3DHxf8I/AAAAAAAAAAk/PDtMZ6y87JE/s1600-h/cloud_4,Barnyardplane.jpg"></a>the plane<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_BASFkhHVQLo/RfrxDTHxf9I/AAAAAAAAAAs/7qZj0Bb1OmM/s1600-h/cloud_4,Barnyardplane.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5042607771769470930" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px" height="271" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_BASFkhHVQLo/RfrxDTHxf9I/AAAAAAAAAAs/7qZj0Bb1OmM/s320/cloud_4,Barnyardplane.jpg" width="186" border="0" /></a> with a layer of foam. This discovery of the gold material plays into Laura's love of experimentation, the serendipity of the find and the working out of how to use it. "Making the planes becomes art" she says, "as I look into the construction and form and how to use the materials to get there." With her drawings and sketches on the walls, models made from pipe cleaners and foam, this process of trial and error is in evidence everywhere in the studio.<br /><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="TEXT-ALIGN: justify" align="justify">A sense of humor, too, is necessary for Laura, who thinks of her sculpture, the clouds and planes, as toy-like, even a bit silly. "They are actually kind of ridiculous objects," she says, of the planes. "They are <i>about</i> flight but they will never fly. They can't fly." This tension between function and form goes back to her college days as a furniture maker. Then, she was intrigued <a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_BASFkhHVQLo/RfrxnjHxf-I/AAAAAAAAAA0/rZPxMgxpQRE/s1600-h/x2.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5042608394539728866" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px" height="207" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_BASFkhHVQLo/RfrxnjHxf-I/AAAAAAAAAA0/rZPxMgxpQRE/s320/x2.jpg" width="302" border="0" /></a>with the sculptural possibilities of chairs and tables, playing with biomorphic shapes and colorful pattern, but the necessity of standard measures, of providing sufficient leg room or platform height, didn't much interest her. "I wasn't into being a craftsperson. I wanted to be imaginative and make sculpture that came alive but that was also a chair." </p><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="TEXT-ALIGN: justify" align="justify">The clouds Laura makes, armatures of reed covered in tracing paper or, more recently, foam carved with an electric steak knife, seem an ideal subject on which to let her imagination fix. Again, the process of finding the right material, manufactured reed or natural willow, furniture maker's foam or closed-cell plastic, and then of how to use it is central. But we can speculate perhaps that this approach, one that relies on <a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_BASFkhHVQLo/Rfry5jHxf_I/AAAAAAAAAA8/bWo46fXuU9o/s1600-h/cloud.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5042609803289001970" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 238px; HEIGHT: 165px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_BASFkhHVQLo/Rfry5jHxf_I/AAAAAAAAAA8/bWo46fXuU9o/s320/cloud.jpg" border="0" /></a>process more than conceptualization—"I work mostly subconsciously," she says, "start working and figure out why later"—is particularly suited to the subject of clouds. In the course of trial and error, of working out her ideas through material experimentation, is the construction of these ephemeral, almost otherworldly, and always-shifting objects emblematic of the imaginative process itself?</p><br /><div align="justify">This may strike some as over-analysis—and fairly enough. What's clear though is that her airplanes, her clouds, the blue of the skies she sets them against, have strong associations with childhood play and imagination. She loves the retro look of old airplanes, their sometimes clunky, sometimes sleek, space-age design, an affinity for old things she developed partly by rummaging through her grandmother's attic as a girl, dressing up in the old clothing and jewelry she found. And the simplified fuselages and wings of her own planes do suggest a kid's idea of aircraft and flight, the wonder that those funny hunks of metal can fly at all. What's more, the wall of her bedroom as a girl was painted in clouds, clouds she now reproduces with the help of an old photograph for the walls of other kids' rooms.</div><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="TEXT-ALIGN: justify" align="justify">The impulse behind her sculpture, then, is clarified, at least a bit, though the significance remains dusky. "Why do artists do anything?" Laura asks, and <a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_BASFkhHVQLo/Rfrz-zHxgAI/AAAAAAAAABE/gPy4sC6EpJk/s1600-h/plane.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5042610992994942978" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 248px; HEIGHT: 156px" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_BASFkhHVQLo/Rfrz-zHxgAI/AAAAAAAAABE/gPy4sC6EpJk/s320/plane.jpg" border="0" /></a>with some just cause. Were she to sculpt the figure—something she's never been interested in—would she be asked so often, as she is about her airplanes, <i>Why, why people?</i> "I don't like to think too much about it," Laura says. "You can end up stuck that way. There's a feeling I get when sculpting that lets me know it's working." She goes about her business, experimenting with wings, leafing through field guides to clouds, thinking about future projects with zeppelins and airships, and letting form, material, and fascination lead the way. </p>Baltimore Interviewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02907515428932839105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28740805.post-1171639296496975712007-02-16T07:19:00.000-08:002007-03-20T11:19:08.368-07:00Sex and Mystery: Paintings of Zachary Thornton<div align="justify"><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/1600/435091/z3.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; width: 285px; height: 203px;" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/320/786202/z3.jpg" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:100%;"><a href="http://www.zacharythornton.com/">Zachary Thornton</a> wants to dispel the notion of himself as a photo-realist. "Technically, my work is representational but in no way photo-real," he says, of his painting. "I want the people and the surroundings to seem real, to have that weight and believability, but also to maintain the vigor and excitement of the act of painting. </span>The goal isn't to copy a photo, make a photo large." Given the exquisite attention to detail in his work, most of which shows past or current girlfriends in various solitary attitudes, and the care taken to define precisely the shape of a lip or the drape of a hand, the impulse to regard his work as photographic in quality is strong. The women he paints are so clearly individuals, so obviously expertly rendered by this painter who has worked as a commissioned portrait artist, that the label <i>photo-realist</i>, perhaps even <i>hyper-realist</i>, seems at first perfectly apt.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/1600/818950/Girl-In-Bed.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/200/520675/Girl-In-Bed.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a> </div><p class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><span style="font-size:100%;">That Zach paints from photos rather than live models, preferring to work</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> in solitud</span><span style="font-size:100%;">e at</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> his</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Mill</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Centre studio, might only reinforce this idea. Except, we learn that many of his compositions arise from combinations of photographs, one perhaps of a girlfriend, the other maybe taken years earlier, a photo of a house, which he then melds together on the canvas. He will also stage the photos he needs, positioning his subject under a streetlight on a summer night, say, which he then will bring back to the easel. "I'm looking for a kind of complexity," Zach says of this process, "a mix of feelings--happy, sinister--and a kind of mysteriousness. I like having three or four possibilities of what might be going on in the painting." </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><span style="font-size:100%;"><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/1600/685801/z.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left;" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/320/474427/z.jpg" border="0" height="244" width="299" /></a>It's not then the bare facts, the subject and her surroundings, that Zach is after, but a mood, a feeling, a story that envelops the painting. A major inspiration for Zach is film. "Whenever I watch a movie," he says, "I'm thinking about composition, framing, what's going on around the characters." This interest in movies is reflected in the fact that many of his paintings are done in film aspect ratio, the 16 by 9 format of a movie screen. The effect this has is to open the painting up, provide space around his subjects, the twilight of a suburban neighborhood, the lights of an approaching car. This space, the landscape rendered in light and shadow, a feeling of things happening just "off stage," contributes tension to the work, mystery. "I have the feeling that someone else is there beyond the edge of the painting, maybe it's me, or you, the viewer," he says. "And I like to think of these women as slightly dangerous."<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/1600/548825/x.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right;" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/320/257993/x.jpg" border="0" height="190" width="284" /></a></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><span style="font-size:100%;">In his efforts to create this tension, Zach finds himself wrestling with the idea of control, a desire to render his subjects in fine detail, but with a competing impulse for looseness as well. One of his favorite painters is John Singer Sargent and the influence is obvious, the still moment surrounded by light and expectancy, the attention to the eyes and posture, the detail, the revelation of personality. "People are what it's all about," he says. "The subject has to be there for it to mean something to me." And in looking at his work we feel this investment in character, the drawing out of emotion and thought in the women's bodies and faces. Yet, <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/1600/381055/z1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left;" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/200/287607/z1.jpg" border="0" /></a>though not as striking or immediately apparent to the eye is the time he has taken with the hazy forms of buildings and trees, the half-fading, half-emerging atmosphere at the wings of the canvas, that just-dark mystery Zach says he remembers so vividly from childhood. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><span style="font-size:100%;">And it's interesting that this tension between realism and ambivalence, control and lack, is reflected in Zach's process as well as his products. As a painter, he feels the need to improve with every work, for each new canvas to be a bit better than the last. Yet, as he says, at some point he invariably goes wrong. "I get to the place where the painting is going okay, but then I get tight, and I mess up." This, he says, is part of the <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/1600/882105/z4.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right;" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/200/454908/z4.jpg" border="0" /></a>method. "I have to break the painting along the way so that I can come back to it later, fix it, and make it better." This moment of breaking, this loss of command, brings vitality, a fresh vision to the canvas. From there, he sets to work again, building character, story, complexity, sex and mystery.</span> </p>Baltimore Interviewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02907515428932839105noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28740805.post-1168620353880229092007-01-12T08:42:00.000-08:002007-01-15T10:50:25.223-08:00Land and Borderland: Photography of Lynn Silverman<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/1600/750608/L2a.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" height="212" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/320/117943/L2a.jpg" width="296" border="0" /></a> <div align="justify">It's hard to pin <a href="http://main.mica.edu/FACULTY_DIRECTORY/index.cfm?faculty_id=136">Lynn Silverman</a> down. If you ask about her photography, its origins, its meanings, its intentions, her answer will be thoughtful and cogent, but it will be full of arrows, first pointing one direction and then another. She resists being interpreted, as do her photographs, the sinuous or stretched cords of lights and lamps, nearly but not quite abstract; the photos of windows that show hints of interior, suggestions of exterior, reflections and shadows; the fantasy tabletops of electronics and forests. Her pictures explore the edges of things, both literally, table edges and window frames, and metaphorically, the boundaries of consciousness and darkness, known quantities and the wild. Her work, as she says, is like that of a surveyor, charting out borderlines and frontiers. </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"><br />In her <em>Lifelines</em> series of photographs, Lynn sets up tableaus of light and shadow, pictures of electrical cords, illuminated by the lamps they power, often draped or stretched over table tops. As she says, these photos are "a way of working with light in a plastic way, actually throwing light and casting shadows, as if it were clay." She enjoys the process, "profoundly physical," of finding the personality of the electrical cords, playing with their tension, positioning their plug ends or frayed wiring at different spots in relationship to the table edge. </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/400/791680/trip.jpg" border="0" /> <div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"><br />For Lynn, this act of representing the cords and the light that illuminates them, drawing out the physical qualities of light, is of primary importance. "I'm working with what I see," she says, "what catches my eye." And yet, in looking at the photographs, one can't miss the metaphorical tensions involved. These are worlds of self-reflexive consciousness: power revealing itself, photography (i.e., <em>writing with light</em>) speaking of itself. Simultaneously, as Lynn points out, there are those regions of the photos that are outside our eye, the darkness below the table edges, for one, into which many of the cords descend. The table tops act as boundaries, light from dark, knowing from unknowing, just as the photos themselves ride the edge between representation and abstraction. In speaking with Lynn, she is careful not to "over-determine" your reaction to the photos either way, content with letting you ride the borderlines.<br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/1600/602719/window.jpg"></a><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/1600/454225/window.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/200/744199/window.jpg" border="0" /></a>The photographs from her <em>Lookout</em> series—interior shots of windows and the things beyond them—work with similar frontiers. Much of the delight in photography for Lynn lies, she says, in "the pleasure of framing," selecting out of the world those regions that will lie within the photo, and the pictures of the windows only double that enjoyment, frames within frames. In these, we are given a window looking out at a scene, of grass, of buildings, of trees. At the same time, we are allowed a hint of interior space, whether of curtains or blinds, a bit of wall and furniture, the ornate aerial of a TV. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, we are given the window itself and the way it reflects, refracts, and distorts, separates and joins the two worlds it borders.<br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/1600/525504/Lynn-Silverman-Interior--2.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/200/898056/Lynn-Silverman-Interior--2.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />In her biography found on her Maryland Institute College of Art homepage (she is an instructor at the college), Lynn writes, "The act of photographing is discovering a series of relationships between you and the world," and "like a surveyor, photographing is an orienting activity." The windows in Lookout thus act as a kind of psychic map, exploring our relationship and our position with the world, internally and externally, giving us a fix on our relative location on the earth. And yet, it's interesting that Lynn works hard to remove identifying signs from the landscapes she shoots through the windows. The grass we see through one window, for example, could be that of a suburban backyard in Maryland or perhaps at the edge of the Australian outback. "Most of the photographs employ a minimal amount of detail to evoke a sense of place, which may make the identification of place ambiguous," Lynn writes. "Such ambiguity plays on the perceived similarity or differences between places."<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/1600/90102/x.jpg"></a><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/1600/391859/x.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/200/15147/x.jpg" border="0" /></a>What we see here is Lynn again letting us choose, playing the line between abstract and concrete, orientation and puzzlement, so that we may bring our own thoughts to bear on the scene depicted. As she says, "the point isn't to make it difficult or into a game," but that tension of knowing and unknowing, she says, "is part of the pleasure of looking," the exploration we make with the eye. Lynn's photographs, in all their minimalism and pared-down composition, invite care and attention to detail. Much thought, feeling, and sensation lie along the boundaries, the edges of her always abutting worlds.</div>Baltimore Interviewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02907515428932839105noreply@blogger.com38tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28740805.post-1165934585362096022006-12-12T06:42:00.000-08:002006-12-26T10:53:17.036-08:00Language in Plastic: Pam Thompson's Sculpture<div align="justify"><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/1600/619136/pam.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" height="237" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/320/135318/pam.jpg" width="296" border="0" /></a><a href="http://faculty.goucher.edu/pthompso/index.htm">Pam Thompson</a>'s studio at the Fox Industries building in Hampden is full of the skins of things. She wraps objects—a coal shovel, a surfboard, a bicycle—in plastic and turns a heat gun on them, forming the plastic around them. When she removes the shovel or surfboard, what is left is not the thing itself but its description, its shape and size, its outer quality. It is as if we see hanging from the walls and leaning in the corners the word Bicycle, the word Grapefruit, the object one off, idealized in filmy plastic. <em>Surfboard</em>, we are told, <em>Lawnmower</em>, but the objects remain just distant, out of hand.<br /></div><div align="justify"><br />As a teacher at Goucher College, Pam is called upon to explain the meanings of art, its processes and qualities, to her students. Her relatio<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/1600/498417/shovel.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/200/126168/shovel.jpg" border="0" /></a>nship with language though, is complicated. As she tells me, "I struggle so much with language and writing, with finding the right adjective, and I'm never satisfied. Art is a struggle too, but there's a visual language that I get, that I accept so much more easily." For Pam, there is a language of space, of "thingness," as she calls it, and the skins of things around her studio are like the units of that language. The plastic film that makes up the outer shell of her bicycle tells her, and us, about the emptiness inside, gives us an opportunity to meditate on what's missing, a new way to think about "bike" by looking at its absence. </div><div align="justify"><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/1600/111046/pam2.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/200/694966/pam2.jpg" border="0" /></a>But if Pam is interested in the nouns of her visual language, Bike and Shovel, she is just as interested in the verbs. She tells me a story of when she was a child, helping her mother cook pudding on the stove top. "It was like magic," she says, "the way I stirred and stirred this liquid, and then all of sudden, it thickened. It was so fast." From that point, Pam was fascinated with emulsions, with chemistry, with the process of things taking shape, going from liquid to solid, or with things disintegrating, losing form. "I'm attracted to entropy, that borderland between object and not object, a perceived image but not quite."</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">Of course, if one is dealing with nouns and verbs, with subjects and actions, the next logical step is to put these words into combination, form them into sentences and paragraphs. In fact, this is an apt description of Pam's installation projects, works such as <em>On Either Side of the Fold</em>, an installation that was shown at the Villa Julie College Gallery. This piece was composed of many smaller units, "Pieta," "Tondo," "Beatrice," units formed sometimes of plastic, sometimes of "readymade" objects like tables and ladders, sometimes encompassing drawings made in, around, and even outside the formal gallery space. </div><div align="justify"><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/1600/744703/salutebeatrice.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 193px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 272px" height="287" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/320/452219/salutebeatrice.jpg" width="200" border="0" /></a><br />"These works," Pam says, "can come together over the course of a year. Individual pieces find their way in and build up narratives." <em>On Either Side of the Fold</em> was, for Pam, both a reaction to a trip to Rome she made in August of 2001 and an exploration of the events of 9-11, which occurred shortly after. In doing research, Pam discovered that the radius of the famous dome of St. Peter's Basilica was the same length as that of the wing of the plane that crashed into the<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/1600/181399/wing.jpg"></a> World Trade Center. Thus, she drew both the outline of the dome <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/1600/169614/wing.jpg"></a>around the gallery space and a diagram of the wing on the floor. Added to this are the various other "words" that compose the piece, the column of lights that represent Dante's muse Beatrice, a ladder for the steps to the lantern around St. Peter's dome, a box of cigarette butts Pam collected once at the top. All of these elements form for Pam a visual storyline, an imagistic narrative of her thoughts, ideas and emotions of the time. </div><div align="justify"><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/1600/84880/wing.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" height="203" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/320/335399/wing.jpg" width="279" border="0" /></a>"I don't have a total plan for what I'm going to do," Pam emphasizes, "but bounce off ideas about what's going on in the world and in my life." Process, again, is critical, as is the flux of coming and going, story being built out of units of language that themselves are in flux, the plastic that makes up the words, and the meanings attached to them, changing over time. "It's entropy as an hourglass" she says, citing one of her favorite writers on the arts, the earthworks sculptor Robert Smithson. "There is black sand at one end and white at the other, and they mix together and become gray. But it gets interesting at the point where they are not too carefully mixed, but just starting." It's that moment of transition, the pudding hardening, the plastic losing definition, the story coming together and the words falling apart, that give Pam inspiration, a unique visual language with which to speak.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="center">**</div><div align="center"></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:78%;"><em>Photo of</em> On Either Side of the Fold<em>, Jeff Goldstein; all others, M. Cantor.</em></span></div><div align="right"></div>Baltimore Interviewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02907515428932839105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28740805.post-1162574107506102192006-11-03T09:13:00.000-08:002006-11-04T06:35:11.056-08:00J.M. Giordano: Blunt Romance<div align="justify"><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/g1.3.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 291px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 251px" height="269" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/320/g1.1.jpg" width="311" border="0" /></a><a href="http://www.jmgiordano.com/">J.M. Giordano</a> photographs a room of empty metal folding chairs. The effect, the composition, is visually arresting, the rows of curved chair tops against the rich blue walls of the room like a shoal of shellfish in a tidal pool. The photograph in its intensity of color and light and arrangement is almost painterly, an interrogation of the senses. And yet, it is a photograph, a document, of a real place in real time, the defunct meeting hall of a defunct steel mill, the chairs standing so orderly, patiently for bodies that won't again fill them. The photo asks a question, what has happened here? that is meant to engage us with the world, even as it presents a nearly idealized portrait of it.<br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/Pete.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 204px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 141px" height="190" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/320/Pete.jpg" width="291" border="0" /></a><br />For J.M., a good photograph is one that presents its subject as emotionally unencumbered as possible, that depicts a scene or person head on and allows the viewer to bring his or her own judgment to it. As he says of one of his portraits in his <em>Stainless</em> series, pictures of retired Bethlehem Steel workers and their now empty plant, "that photograph of Pete is so sad. But I didn't make him sad, didn't sit him down in front of a white background for you to interpret him in that way." And this quality, this almost sense of "banality," as J.M. calls it, is found in many of his photos. The picture of Pete—there in his foam cap, standing in his wood-paneled room—is presented with a flatness of effect, a compositional quality that says, this is what it's like, what Pete is like, at home, right now, no frills.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/71065436_df1f94fb41.1.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/200/71065436_df1f94fb41.0.jpg" border="0" /></a>And yet, there is a tension in J.M.'s work between his desire for bluntness—"I am a realist," he says—and the need to invest his photos with more than fact, more than the unadorned world. It is this tension that gives the photos in, for example, his <em>American Boxing</em> series a hint of surrealism, a gritty portrayal of fighters and their environment that nevertheless takes on a bit of otherworldly glow. His picture of the trophies the boxers bring home after a successful bout gives a sense of the paltriness of the prize, such tiny golden trinkets, but the bright, saturated reds, the gleaming light, infuse the photo with a kind of hard-edged romance, rich but tough.<br /><br />In speaking with J.M., it quickly becomes apparent that his artistic influences arise as much from painting as photography. "I try to think like a painter for certain photos," he says, "with a painter's eye," adding that he is a big fan of both the German romantic painter Casper David Friedrich and of the American Ashcan school, the group of New York realists interested in the urban poor. Here again, in these influences, we see the pull between an idealized, romantic world and the search for a certain gritty bluntness. We also see how, in photographs like that of the mist rising over a decaying industrial site, the tension between the need to compose a vivid scene and the wish to let the picture tell its own story, a tension the Ashcan painters must have felt themselves. <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/chairs.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 298px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 196px" height="203" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/320/chairs.jpg" width="308" border="0" /></a><br /><br />As J.M. says of one of his favorite photo-graphers, Alex Soth, "when you look at those photos, they make you think. <em>That's</em> good photography." We see this in his <em>Stainless</em> photos, and we see it in the <em>American Darkness</em> series, portraits of the American landscape post-9/11, guns, barbershops, street corners, mostly empty, always dark. That darkness, as he says, is as much metaphoric as literal, a pessimistic comment on the current state of the country. The thought that stands behind the photos, the theme, night, rubs against their quiet composition, the random nonrandom patterns of shadow and white light, the pull of reality and surreality, commentary and documentary, the tension that causes us to stop a moment and linger. </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="center">* *</div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:85%;">See <em>Stainless</em> at Baltimore's Creative Alliance Nov 4 to Dec 16, 2006.</span></div>Baltimore Interviewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02907515428932839105noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28740805.post-1159976278539443242006-10-04T08:37:00.000-07:002007-02-03T09:11:00.606-08:00Cathedrals of Pornography: The Paintings of Heidi Neff<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/1600/737573/H1.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 290px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px" height="240" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2816/3049/320/639836/H1.jpg" width="301" border="0" /></a>The subject matter of <a href="http://heidineff.com">Heidi Neff's </a>cathedral paintings is not elusive. In bold color and fine, hard-edged detail, we see renditions of European cathedral ceilings—Italian Rococo and German Baroque. Except, in place of the hosts of angels or the ascension of Christ, we get bodies twined into sexual frenzy, men and women clutched together in copulation, oral sex, single women with legs bent wide, faces contorted with erotic passion. These figures twisting up into the creamy blue and white heavens or hanging in cruciform pattern above the altar are, as Heidi says, modeled directly from contemporary pornographic magazines. The effect, the juxtaposition, of the religious with the tawdry, 18th century Christian orthodoxy with 21st century sexual sale, is compelling, and engaging. <div align="justify"><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/evensong.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 229px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 220px" height="286" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/320/evensong.jpg" width="290" border="0" /></a><br />Given the number of Heidi's works that deal with religion, it might not be surprising to know she grew up steeped in Christianity, her father a Seventh-Day Adventist pastor until Heidi was nine. After he left the ministry, Heidi says, "We spent a year going to every kind of Christian church, until we settled on a new one." At this point, it might be easy to say, <em>Aha, the preacher's daughter! Your paintings, their graphic and profane sexuality, are meant as critiques of the church.</em> And, the rather flashy, pop-art use of borrowed images, from pornography, politics, and television, do invite this kind of interpretation, the paintings' humorous conflations tempting us to mockery. To stop there though, at irony and church bashing, would be to miss much in Heidi's work.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/Save%20Me%20Lord.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 156px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 249px" height="282" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/320/Save%20Me%20Lord.jpg" width="176" border="0" /></a>In her Manuscript series, Heidi takes medieval or other religious manuscript forms and contemporizes them with events out of the daily newspaper, the rescue helicopters of the Hurricaine Katrina tragedy, the World Trade Center in flames. In one of these paintings, "Save Me Lord," on a background of mountainous terrain both tropical and perhaps Middle Eastern, Heidi paints various phrases in a kind of Gothic script. "Save me Lord, for I am drowning" says one, and another, "Acts of God and manmade terrors compete for attention." In this work, it is again tempting to see only a harsh criticism of religion, a pie in the sky entity conspicuously missing whenever it is needed most. But to jump to this conclusion is to miss the truly heartfelt passion in these phrases, the sincere emotion that drives us to, or away, from the spirit in times of disaster and upheaval.<br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/My%20God.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 153px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 226px" height="289" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/320/My%20God.jpg" width="179" border="0" /></a><br />"When do people start to get a <em>real</em> feeling for religion," Heidi says, "When do they start to question what's out there? I mean, huge natural disasters are still called 'acts of God.'" For Heidi, the religious aspect of her paintings are meant as a seeking out, an asking of these essential questions. When she paints a column of open, screaming mouths in "My God" alongside the faces of terrified children, an enormous wave crashing into a city, and some sort of mythological creature with angel's wings, we are invited to take this not so much as a criticism of faith as an exploration of it, the way in which it works in our lives. <em>My God?</em> asks the painting, <em>Where are you? What are you? Why are you?</em> </div><p align="justify"><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/h3.1.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/200/h3.0.jpg" border="0" /></a>As Heidi makes a point to tell me, "I have an issue with irony. I think I'm pretty earnest." For her, the cathedral ceilings and manuscript series are not meant as an outsider's slap to the face of the church, not as a cool, smirking commentary or angry harangue, but as an up-close study of the tragedy and comedy of passion. The passions of love, lust, the search for spiritual meaning are common to us all. And given this democracy of feeling, Heidi's goal is to make her work as accessible as possible. As she says, "I want people to be able to appreciate my art who don't have an art background." It's in the exploration of the basic human themes of religion, ecstasy, a questioning of the order of the world, that brings her art near, gathering the cathedrals of Europe, the tragedies of Indonesia and New Orleans, the experiences of the minister's daughter into a series of boldly rendered canvases whose subject is us. </p><p align="justify"></p>Baltimore Interviewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02907515428932839105noreply@blogger.com125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28740805.post-1157223454868079942006-09-02T11:56:00.000-07:002006-09-03T10:57:18.430-07:00Jason Hughes's Cleanly Doors*<div align="justify"><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/j1a.1.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" height="216" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/200/j1a.0.jpg" width="187" border="0" /></a>In one of his graphite on paper drawings, artist and curator <a href="http://jasonhughes.org/">Jason Hughes</a> depicts three doors. What is interesting about these doors is that we cannot be sure whether we are on the inside of whatever structure the doors are affixed to, or on the outside. There is no context for them, no walls, no room, no other element with which we may situate ourselves. The result is that, as we look at the drawing, we can imagine ourselves positioned within, or without, any number of spaces, the hallway of some dingy office building, an alley outside a department store, the conference room of some old downtown hotel. The doors invite us to use our memories and imagination to develop any kind of environment we might wish.<br /><br />This inside-outside dichotomy is central to much of Jason's work. As he says, "I am very interested in space and how I can take something from the psychic realm and push it into a physical experience." In other words, in his drawings, which have a very sculptural quality in and of themselves—a<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/doors.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 275px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 227px" height="213" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/320/doors.jpg" width="300" border="0" /></a>n examination of space in two dimensions—Jason is interested in exploring his inner landscapes, his thoughts, ideas, and emotions, and giving them form in the physical realm of art. Another of his drawings, "Crossing Paths," demonstrates this very well. The drawing shows the convergence of two grassy paths, that is, a landscape, with a ladder descending into a hole at the work's center. At the time he made the drawing, Jason told me, he was coming to grips with his anxiety about his ability in representational drawing, whether he could contend with his peers in this important skill. The picture then is a careful portrait of his emotional state, <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/paths.jpg"></a>the outside pressures of his art world reputation converging on his feelings of adequacy, as well as a depiction of his decision to climb inside himself and deal with these fears.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/camera.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" height="184" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/320/camera.jpg" width="272" border="0" /></a>In the same vein, Jason's curatorial work at <a href="http://www.mdartplace.org/">Maryland Art Place</a> is interested in the interaction between our inner and outer environments. The show, "<a href="http://www.mdartplace.org/html/wh/curexh.htm">Material Matters</a>," is a critique of our consumerist society and how we both shape it and are shaped by it. "The ideology behind consumerism," Jason writes in the show's catalogue, "innately manipulates our wants as needs in order to temporarily pacify our internal struggles and insecurities, while embracing us through a manufactured 'consumer' identity. In so doing, we become complicit, indifferent, or totally naive as to how our choices and habits affect our personal lives, the greater community, and entire cultures."<br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/card1.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/200/card1.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />This interaction of our "manufactured identify" with the greater community is assessed in such works as Walterio Iraheta’s "Kryponita," an at once humorous and scathing look at the iconography of Superman and the way it has changed and been manipulated, and in Cliff Evans' video installation, "The Road to Mount Weather," a mesmerizing and unsettling animated collage of images taken from the Internet. These pieces, as well as works by many other local, national, and international artists, attempt to unveil the sometimes too well-hidden consequences our materialist mindset. As such, the art works not only as doorway between our own personal worlds, but between our Western society and that of the developing world.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/inkonpaper_72.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 180px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 249px" height="296" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/320/inkonpaper_72.jpg" width="222" border="0" /></a>That art can function as such a doorway is important to Jason, as we can see by looking at both his own art and that of "Material Matters." However, it is important to note Jason's interest in the primacy of the artwork itself, its physical form. As he told me, "Finding a way through the visual medium is the most important way of connecting with the arts. It's one thing to say what [an art piece] is about, but does it come through in the work?" The ideas, the politics, the conception of a drawing or sculpture are interesting and integral, they provide its contextual background, but the work itself should convey these elements through its use of color, shape, line, texture. And just as important is the question of whether the work is visually arresting, whether it can draw the eye. "I'm a very visually oriented person," Jason says. "I wanted to work with artists [for "Material Matters"] who are very much a part of producing a visual experience."<br /><br />For Jason, who believes there is often a disconnect between the art world and the general public, this highly visual quality of art can serve as a way to democratize the arts, to make art that is, as Jason has written, "procreated on an egalitarian level." The kind of art in which care has been taken to open the door between thought and design will stand the greatest chance of drawing interested viewers. We may come away from such art changed, thus changing the world in which we live. </div><div align="justify"></div><em><span style="font-size:78%;"><div align="center"><br />* * * </div><p align="justify">*"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite." </p><p align="justify"></span></em><em><span style="font-size:78%;">--William Blake</span></em></p><p align="justify"><em><span style="font-size:78%;"></span></em> </p><p align="justify"><em><span style="font-size:68%;">Photo of Jason, Michael Cantor; "Shanty Mall," Simón Vega; all other works, Jason Hughes</span></em></p>Baltimore Interviewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02907515428932839105noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28740805.post-1154619231953010572006-08-03T08:22:00.000-07:002006-08-03T11:05:35.626-07:00Nikc Miller's Garbage Can<div align="justify"><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/nikc1.0.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" height="193" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/320/nikc1.0.jpg" width="266" border="0" /></a>Chaos suits <a href="http://www.betterhollywood.com/bios.htm">Nikc Miller</a>. His creative process is a pandemonium of inspiration, influence, and improvisation. As the filmmaker and musician says, he operates under a "garbage can philosophy," a mishmash of pop culture references and rifs and private jokes. "I take all my own oddities in my brain," he says, "and mix them all up," his movies and songs "a random collection of ideas, all thrown together." And in visiting him, I see this chaos in full swing. I arrived in the middle of band practice, and as I interviewed him, his band mates, members of the Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad, strummed guitars, banged on drums, and interjected with comments, clarifications, and jokes of their own, turning the interview into a kind of collective performance. Meanwhile, in the next room, actors who have appeared in Nikc's short films, efforts of his <a href="http://www.betterhollywood.com/">Better Hollywood Productions</a>, drank beer and practiced their lines. In the midst of it all, Nikc seemed not only happy and at home but flush with creative excitement.<br /></div><div align="justify"><br />What's surprising about this anarchy of approach is how productive Nikc and company are. The band was quite adamant that the album they were recording would be complete by summer's end, no more than two months off. After that, Nikc says, he would be back to film-<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/band.4.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 290px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 236px" height="257" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/320/band.4.jpg" width="312" border="0" /></a>making, finishing his script for a feature-length movie. To date, Nikc has completed 15 short films and contributed to Flute Squad drummer <a href="http://www.37point5.com/">Ryan Graham's </a>own feature film, "Livelihood." Even more significant is the outcome of all this activity, the products made. The movies, songs, live performances—though born of chaos and singularly reflective of that garbage-can, pop-culture mishmash—are remarkably whole. Disorder for Nikc becomes oddly cohesive. </div><div align="center"><br />*</div><div align="justify"><br />Nikc's short film "A Special Message From CCAQZ [Christian Coalition Against Queer Zombies]" is, in part, a send-up of the zombie-movie genre. Shot in black and white to mimic "Night of the Living Dead," the zombie in Nikc's film isn't so interested in eating human flesh as he is in getting off on it, both the hunks in his gay porno mag and the young, red-blooded boys playing football in the cemetery. As the boys and their girlfriend (mis)quote from Leviticus and expound on various techniques for anal sex, the queer zombie stalks them, finally finding his opportunity for a bit of anal rape, undead style. The boys are understandably upset by this. And yet, not really. As one says afterwards, "That gay zombie ain't so bad. He doesn't want to eat our brains, he just wants to party."</div><div align="justify"><br />That incongruity of the God-fearing, homophobic teens who also make cracks about "bear hunting" and "ass cream" gives the movie its humor. That and the fact that, as the title indicates, the footage of the kids in the graveyard is supposed to be an educational film about the dangers of queer zombiedom, with a cowboy on horseback appearing at the end to warn us of their mind-warping perversions: "Rimjobs and the ever-lovin' analingus. So sinfully sweet." Add to that the soundtrack, composed of 15 different song segments in the movie's 8 minutes, each serving as sort of theme for a character or situation, gay disco for the zombie, lush strings for the teens, and you begin to understand what Nikc means by "garbage can philosophy." The movie makes no bones about its seeming lack of logic or dramatic unity.</div><div align="justify"><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/glass.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 140px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 188px" height="288" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/320/glass.jpg" width="200" border="0" /></a><br />And the same might be said for the Flute Squad's live performances. As Nikc plays his guitar, Ryan drums, and <a href="http://www.angelfire.com/moon/brianadamant/">Brian Adam Ant</a> plays bass, front man Steve Thomas sings such Nikc-penned songs as "Unicorn" and "I Like Myself (I'm Worth A Lot)" while wearing an enormously oversized horse head. Meanwhile, Better Hollywood collaborator <a href="http://www.betterhollywood.com/bios.htm">Mike Bennet</a>, dressed in a Mexican wrestler's mask and a turquoise and pink wind-breaker, slugs from a bottle of liquor and gesticulates wildly to the crowd. The effect is, needless to say, rather hectic.</div><div align="justify"><br />But it's also entertaining. As Nikc says, his overarching goal, for songs, movies, concerts, is "giving the audience a good time by any means necessary." And he accomplishes this through a rather deft feat: reflecting the chaos of our 21st century lives while producing a unified, if also hyperactive, product.</div><div align="justify"><br />Take another of Nikc's short films, "Robot-ussin." In this one, a guy sitting at his drawing table takes a big swig from his bottle of "Tussin" (ie, Robitussin, the cough syrup with supposedly psychoactive properties), and the robot he is penning comes to life, jumping off the drawing tablet. The guy wanders outside, head full of fumes, and meets up with the very same automaton walking down the street, who offers him a can of chunk ham. This film, like "A <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/robotussinscrshot_000.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 197px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 148px" height="136" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/320/robotussinscrshot_000.jpg" width="177" border="0" /></a>Special Message From CCAQZ," is jam packed with music—yodeling, martial marches, choruses of psychotic voices. In the end, in some sort of homage to Scooby Doo or maybe Mission Impossible, the guy, after gunning the robot down with a laser gun, pulls its head off to reveal a puppet inside, one who looks a lot like the character from the Mario Bros. video games. </div><div align="justify"><br />And what is it that ties this hodgepodge of influences and ideas together? The fact that each of the elements in the movie, each pop-culture rif, reflects back to us our cultural lives, the can of chunk ham, the puppet, the Tussin, each an echo of the chaotic, random, fast-cut, and kitsch-laden nature of late capitalist America. The references, in their seeming randomness, come to reinforce one another, become mirrors for each another and for what we know about our media-saturated environment. This movie, and the others, is therefore not just a spoof of Scooby Doo, or "Night of the Living Dead," but a remark, an observation on the aesthetics of our surroundings. </div><div align="justify"><br />More than this, it's the attitude of the films, the music performances, that helps to shape them. Parody is easy. To affect a hip, ironic stance, grabbing at television and popular movies, mocking American Idol and gansta rap, looking snidely at Fox News and then throwing them all together for laughs, takes relatively little skill, the provenance of most pop-culturally savvy teenagers. What Nikc and his collaborators manage to do is bring both an energy to their performances and a care for the material, an artistic and emotional investment in the sources, that invests each separate element with purpose and vigor. When Nikc talks of mining "the lower realms of pop culture" for ideas, the sense I have is that he is talking not about a culture outside of and beneath himself, but rather the cultural history of his life. The movies and music convey an almost nostalgic warmth, and this mood, the overall unity of tone, more than anything conveys the feeling of cohesion.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="center">* </div><div align="center"></div><div align="justify"><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/nikc2.0.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/200/nikc2.jpg" border="0" /></a>As Nikc stated several times during our interview, the humor of his music, the mixed-up oddity of his movies has "evolved into some sort of style, become a hit I then feel like I have to keep up with." He is aware of the demands of his audience, conscious of the shape and effect of his products. He knows what his viewers and listeners are after and that's a bit of chaos, a taste of mayhem, a couple treats from the garbage can. Or, as his hallucinatory, foul-mouthed, robot from "Robot-ussin" might ask, "Do you want some chunk ham?" </div>Baltimore Interviewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02907515428932839105noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28740805.post-1151678453535209822006-06-30T07:39:00.000-07:002006-07-05T12:47:59.313-07:00The Autobiography of Wasyl Palijczuk<div align="justify"><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/Wasyl2.1.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/200/Wasyl2.0.jpg" border="0" /></a> Wasyl Palijczuk's sculpture, "Welcome," at McDaniel College in Westminster, MD throws up its open hands in greeting. His combined photograph/print/drawing of an old man in the Ukraine shucking corn glows with vivid color—warm orange and bright reds. His small soapstone carving, "<a href="http://www.carr.org/arts/index_files/Page2179.htm">The Caregiver</a>," depicts a child wrapped in the arms of a serene, grandmotherly woman. According to Wasyl, who was born in the Carpathian Mountains, he was alone most of his childhood; his father, who worked for the Poles, was first arrested by the Russians and then later by the Nazis. After living out the war by himself in Germany, Wasyl emigrated to the U.S., spending time in a children's home in New York before being sent alone by train to Baltimore. His first home, he says, was the one he moved into in Charles Village during the Baltimore riots of 1968. <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/Welcome%20sculpture.1.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 173px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 250px" height="277" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/320/Welcome%20sculpture.1.jpg" width="188" border="0" /></a></div><div align="justify"><br />"Whatever I paint comes out of my heart, my brain, my background," says Wasyl. "Whatever you see, you know sooner or later it has to do with me." This claim of autobiography at first seems strange, given his art—almost invariably bright, celebratory, and humane—and then his early history, marked by poverty and war. Where in the record of the many paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints that fill his studio is the dark color of loneliness, the aggressive brush stroke of violence, the cramped and hollow detail of hunger? Where is the bitterness? </div><div align="center"><br />**</div><div align="center"></div><div align="justify"><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/willow.1.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 215px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 226px" height="265" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/320/willow.1.jpg" width="240" border="0" /></a>Wasyl is an artist of intuition, his painting and sculpture a result of unplanned exploration. As he says, "I take a canvas and start smearing things on it, start developing it. I have to look into it and turn it and see what comes to mind." This you can see in the many half-finished, half-abstract canvasses he has leaning against the walls, paintings he will come back to many times, adding figures or scenes as they rise out of the paint and from of his imagination. Even in the more figurative works, the Ukrainian scenes, the willow trees and rivers, you sense a study of memory and time, a reaching back for a 60-year-old sensation that takes form as the canvas is worked.</div><div align="justify"><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/willow.0.jpg"></a><br />And given this method, this free association, we assume the end product is indeed autobiographical, a recording of his inner developments, his thoughts and feelings. The outheld wings of the owl carved into the massive chunk of granite in his "Fountain" at Westminster are thus the open shape of his ideas. And the richly colored, amorphous, and contemplative shapes of his Mexico watercolors bring to mind the color fields of Rothko, the attempt to make concrete a spiritual process. </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 277px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 146px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" height="146" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/320/w5.0.jpg" width="291" border="0" /> <div align="justify"><br />What's more, it's no contradiction to Wasyl to paint, on the one hand, his own version of Russian iconography, his semi-abstracted Mary and Child, and on the other to make a drawing of Jewish religious life. "People say, hey, what are you doing here? Well, I am an artist," he insists, "I am expressing feelings, I am expressing myself." For Waysl, the "myself" is not limited to one culture, region, or background, but includes all the cultures and countries with which he's been in contact, the human experience he has known. One can come to understand that in many ways the "myself" of Wasyl's art is a universal, that the autobiography of one man is the biography of us all. </div><div align="center"><br />**</div><div align="justify"><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/w4.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 263px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 186px" height="184" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/320/w4.jpg" width="289" border="0" /></a><br />But this again begs the question: Where the misery? Where the darkness? How in the process of time, memory, and experience has Wasyl omitted, or rather we should say transformed, the turmoil he's seen? Perhaps the answer lies in his approach to life, a manner remarkably similar to his method in art. In speaking of his past, Wasyl is fond of the word accident, the word puzzle. "All my life was a puzzle," he says. "I never predicted it. I got my job [teaching] at Western Maryland College accidentally. I didn't ask for it, I was going to open a sculpture studio. My whole life was an accident." He also talks of his introduction to art in these terms, telling me how as a boy of 5, alone at home, he saw a blank white wall and in the stove a pile of ashes. "For some stupid reason, something told me to pick [those ashes] up, smear it on my finger, try it on the wall…I didn't know what art was. I had no training. It was almost like I was pushed into it."</div><div align="justify"><br />His discovery of art then, as well as his career as an artist and teacher, rose out of the materials, the opportunities, around him, much the same way the figures in his sculptures emerge from the piece of stone or block of wood. Life is an accident, some of it fortuitous, some less so, but all of it a possibility. For his troubles as a 5-year-old budding artist, his father came home and beat him. The lesson, Wasyl says, was to stay away from art, one obviously not taken to heart. Rather this experience, and the many that came after in his young life, seemed to teach Wasyl a resilience and an openness, even a predilection, to the bright colors of the world in spite of its darker tendencies.</div><div align="center"><br />**</div><div align="justify"><br />One painting I did not see but which Wasyl described to me was inspired by an event of some 40 years ago. A boy of about 15 decided to climb the Berlin Wall. He scaled the western side, which was cement, and when he reached the top, the communists shot him. The boy fell and landed between the western wall and the barbed wire fence of the east. There he lay wounded, the west unable to cross over and help him, the east apparently unwilling. "So the kid," Wasyl says, "this totally stupid, innocent thing, is bleeding to death because of t<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/w1.0.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 143px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 178px" height="254" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/320/w1.0.jpg" width="186" border="0" /></a>wo stupid governments." In reaction, fueled by his anger, his passion, the experiences of his life, Wasyl painted: "There was a very abstract body, lying between the sides," he tells me. "And he's reaching, barely reaching with his hand, over the wall, and there's the sun, and he's reaching for light, or freedom." </div><div align="justify"></div>Baltimore Interviewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02907515428932839105noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28740805.post-1148662202945247792006-05-26T09:49:00.000-07:002010-11-06T18:28:42.354-07:00Waiting Train, Christine Sajecki, Waiting Train<div align="justify"><br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/saj1.3.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; FLOAT: left; CURSOR: hand" border="0" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/320/saj1.3.jpg" /></a><br />In nearly the geographic dead center of her studio is <a href="http://www.csajecki.com/">Christine Sajecki</a>'s bed. Around it is work, the paintings of friends and influences, photographs she has arranged into a gridded collage, and her own works in progress, canvasses half formed of paint and wax, others seemingly finished but which Christine is still working over—adjusting and layering. On the one hand, her bed, soft and expectant and waiting, as beds always are, and on the other, the concrete walls and spattered floors, the work space, the place of industry.<br /><br />As Christine has told me, she does not believe in talent, a painter is not born, and neither a writer, nor musician, nor acrobat. Work she says, is what makes a painting, an idea held in the mind and the time and effort it takes to realize that idea into material form. As she says of one of her major artistic and working influences, assistant painting instructor <a href="http://www.caominxie.com/">Caomin Xie</a> at The Savannah College of Arts and Design, "He's so methodical and scientific in the way he works," as if a canvas were a experiment in paint, a study performed to uncover the image that exists within it. Christine too becomes enthusiastic about paint, though for her it may be less like a chemical regent in a test tube and more like the ingredients for a cake: "I love the way it comes out of the tube, and it's just beautiful, raw color, buttery and edible looking." <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/interview.jpg"></a><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/interviewbw.jpg"></a><br />Industry, then, is Christine's watchword, as reflected in the raw, urban space she lives and paints in, the Copy Cat building in Baltimore's gritty Station North Arts District, and in her work habits, dedicating a major chunk of each day to her canvases. And yet, there is that bed, languid at the heart of work.<br /></div><div align="center"><br />** </div><div align="justify"><br />One recent series of Christine's paintings are studies of circus <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/mixing.jpg"></a>acrobats at work: trapeze artists in mid-swing, tightrope walkers, gymnasts. These paintings are done in the encaustic style, a method of adding pigment to beeswax and then applying it to the canvas in fast-drying layers, a medium Christine describes as very difficult to work with. As might be expected, this difficulty appeals to her and reflects an underlying theme of the paintings– the effort it takes to become an acrobat. "These people," says Christine, who came to know the performers while working as a circus usher, "have the same risk of falling you or I have. But it's the courage, discipline, and hard work that gets them where they are." That effort is seen in the faces and bodies of her subjects, the poised, muscular limbs, the steady eyes. <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/mixing.0.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 219px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 143px; CURSOR: hand" border="0" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/320/mixing.jpg" width="266" height="176" /></a> </div><div align="justify"><br />But there is another quality to these paintings–a reserved and expectant mystery, an unresolved depth, a sense of pregnant stasis–and this too is a reflection of the medium used, the subject captured. Take a look at her painting, You Do Not Have to be Good, for example. The painting illustrates a tightrope walker in mid-balance, arms thrown up and out, one leg held horizontal, head eased back over the shoulders. And yet, though the acrobat is presumably in the midst of her routine, the painting does not convey a feeling of movement, of tension, of sweat and strain, but rather of quiet and stillness, as if Christine has captured the performer in one moment of perfect equilibrium. There is a feeling of hush, like an audience straining upward, toward the peak of a circus tent, holding its collective breath. This sense of stillness is given off by the quietly luminous paint and mildly unfocused forms that make up the acrobat's limbs and trunk. The legs seem to shed light in quivering halos, the body to be a kind of cool, speckled sun. The left arm is blurred and appears to be duplicated in a ghost image of itself, as if the camera shutter of Christine's imagination were not fast enough to freeze it completely in time. Strangely enough, this reminder of movement only adds to the feeling of stasis, as do the lazy, shadowed geese that hang above in the circus sky.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/begood.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; FLOAT: left; CURSOR: hand" border="0" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/200/begood.jpg" /></a>And as much as the circus people themselves radiate this pregnant waiting, the backgrounds of the paintings do too, the strata of wax and pigment worked and layered, layered and worked, until fairly oozing with luminous expectancy. And this same quietude is felt in Christine's Telescape series, too, as the women, phone in hand, stand before their own gloaming backgrounds. There remains that tension between action and calm, industry and idleness. The nakedness of most of the women, as in Say Hello to Everyone, and the looseness of their bodies, suggests calm, while the presence of the telephones creates an almost narrative tension, a story hidden at the heart of the scene that promises to unfold if we just wait for it to begin. The telephones act almost as talismans of tension and power, potent and unruly.<br /><br />As Christine told me, "Painting is craft but also a little bit of magic," adding, "And I don't want to talk about it," as if that magic might be lost by bringing it too much into the light of day. This undeclared quantity suffuses so much of her work, whether in the circus series or in the deep historicity of Wondering Man, one of her paintings based on pre-Colombian art, or in her Cocktail Series, paintings inspired by photographs from her parent's wedding album. In these, the magic takes its potency from the mystery of time. "I was fascinated with that day because of the wildness they had before marriage, domesticity," she says, "imagining them without each other and their vulnerability, all the possibilities before them, but this day being right on the edge of that, of the comfortable suburban life that is my past." Here too, the work is underlain with tension, the beauty and pain of nostalgia, the power of memory to shape the present but our helplessness to rework the past.<br /></div><div align="center"><br />** </div><div align="justify"><br />Through the windows of Christine's studio, we hear the trains of Penn Station roll in. They hiss and groan, bells clanking, huge engines whirring. The trains fill the studio with the noise of work and power, the smell of oil and diesel in the breeze. But when later we go to the window and look down, we see the sooted cars and the greasy bulk of the locomotive idling on the tracks, the doors slid open to admit the passengers to the soft, sleepy murk of the cabins. The effect is both soothing and pensive, a feeling of rich expectancy. This tension, work and waiting, potency and restraint, is the very atmosphere of Christine's studio. The paintings sit on the easel, the wax melts in the warming pan, the brushes wait for the animation of her hand. </div><div align="justify"></div><br /><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; DISPLAY: block; CURSOR: hand" border="0" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/320/view.jpg" /><br /><br /><p><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2816/3049/1600/Wasyl2.0.jpg"></a></p><p></p><p></p>Baltimore Interviewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02907515428932839105noreply@blogger.com15